The Russian army was the largest in Europe, it had defeated Napoleon, but it was
poorly trained, undersupplied, inadequately equipped, and unprepared.
Peasant soldiers in the Russian armies lost their will to fight and began to
desert. The tzar had to deal with
domestic discontent and internal resistance. There was a militant labor
movement and a rebellious urban population. City dwellers coped with
inflation and agrarian shortages of food, grains, and fuel.

In the Revolution of 1905, Czar Nicholas II's
priest, Father Gapon led a protest march of tens of
thousands of workers over the conditions in St. Petersburg. On January 22,
1905 troops
fired on the crowd, killing hundreds on "Bloody Sunday." Worker
strikes and feudal peasant uprisings called for change. The czar promised
reform and a Duma to represent all classes. A Duma (parliament) was elected that was boycotted by the
Marxists, who urged revolution. Rasputin, "the mad monk,"
influenced the czar's wife Alexandra by claiming to have cured the czar's only
son of hemophilia. Rasputin was murdered and the czar delayed reform.

In February, 1917, in Petrograd, now St. Petersburg forces revolted on International Women's
Day, February 23. An organized march of women-workers, mothers, and wives
demanded food, fuel, and political reform. Demonstrations and strikes
swept through the country. At a mass strike, tsar
Nicholas II sent in police and military to halt the riot. 60,000 Petrograd troops mutinied and joined the
revolt. Nicholas II abdicated the
throne on March 2.

After the overthrow of the tsar's autocracy, two centers of power
emerged. The provisional government led by leaders in the Duma (parliament) was composed of middle class
liberals. Kerensky headed the provisional
government, distorting the grievances of the lower classes. The new
government system was established under constitutional rule. It set up a
national election for a constituent assembly to grant and secure civil
liberties, release political prisoners, and redirect power to local
officials. The other center of power was with the soviets, local
councils elected by workers and soldiers. Soviet councils claimed to
be true representatives of the people.

Leon Trotsky claimed to be the legitimate political power in Russia. He pressed for social reform,
redistribution of land and negotiated settlement with Germany to get out of the war. The
provisional government refused to desert the allies or concede defeat
militarily. War was unpopular and unsupported. Many deserted the
army. The transitional, provisionary government was in chaos.

The Bolsheviks, a majority branch of Russian social democracy movement
overthrew the provisional government. Marxixt
leadership of the Russian Social Democrats took revolutionary steps toward
socialism. The Bolsheviks, radical members of the majority, favored a
centralized party of active revolutionaries. Revolution alone would lead
directly to a socialist regime. The Mensheviks, members of the minority,
wanted socialism gradually.

In the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Bolsheviks revolutionary
leadership was VladamirIlyichUlyanov, or Lenin, a member of the middle
class, expelled from University for engaging in radical activity, and spent
three years as a political prisoner in Siberia. From 1900-1917 he wrote as an
exile in Western
Europe.

Lenin believed the development of Russian capitalism made socialist revolution
possible. The Bolsheviks needed to organize the new class of industrial
workers, to bring revolution. Factory workers needed party leadership to
accomplish the goal of revolution. Russian revolutionary tradition and
Marxism could achieve their goals immediately. The Bolsheviks demanded an
end to the war with Germany and Austria, improvement in working and living
conditions for workers, and redistribution of aristocratic land to the
peasantry.

Lenin condemned imperialist war policies and opposed the bourgeoisie
government. He called for "Peace, Land, and Bread Now" and
"All Power to the Soviets," winning Bolshevik support from
workers, soldiers, and peasants. Unemployment, starvation, and chaos in Russia - the Bolsheviks power was rising
fast. Lenin and the Bolsheviks attacked the provisional government and
took over the WinterPalace onOctober 25, 1917. They moved against all political
competition, beginning with the Soviets, and expelled opposition parties,
creating a new Bolsheviks government.

When the Bolsheviks did not win a majority in the elections, they dispersed the
Constituent Assembly by force, and Lenin's Bolsheviks ruled socialist Russia and the Soviet Union as a one party dictatorship.
Peasants took over land they had worked for generations now rightfully
theirs. Bolsheviks redistributed the nobles' land to peasants.
Bolsheviks nationalized banks, and gave workers control of factories.

Taking Russia out of the war, a separate treaty
with Germany was negotiated by Trotsky, and signed at
Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918. The Bolsheviks surrendered Russian
agricultural territories of Ukraine, Georgia, Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states. The treaty ended Russia's role in the fighting, saving the
communist regime from certain military defeat by the Germans.

The Revolution allowed the Germans to win the war on the Eastern Front.
The socialists held power in what many considered a backward country. The
Russian revolution, "the ten days that shook the world," was a
political transformation that set up future revolutionary struggles. The Bolshevik
takeover in October, 1917 began revolutionary events in Russia. Under Lenin's leadership, the
Bolsheviks seized internal political power, and withdrew from the war.
This polarized Russian society and set off a civil war. The
enemies of the Bolsheviks, those associated with the ousted tsarist regime,
began to attack the new government. Known collectively as "Whites,"
the Bolsheviks opponents had the common goal of removing the "Reds"
from power. The Whites military force came from reactionary monarchists,
the old nobility, the provisional government, and anarchists, or "Greens"
who opposed all centralized state power and joined the Whites.

The United States, Great Britain, and Japan threatened intervention. Outside
support for the Whites was no threat to the Bolsheviks, who used the
intervention as propaganda claiming the Whites were assisting foreign powers in
invading Russia. The Bolsheviks mistrusted the
capitalist world powers which in the Marxist view,
naturally opposed the existence of the world's first "socialist"
state.

The Bolsheviks eventually won the civil war, gaining greater support and
acceptance from the population, and were better organized for the civil
war. The Bolsheviks quickly mobilized to fight. Leon Trotsky
became the new commisar of war,
and his Red Army of 5 million defeated White armies in 1920 and put down the
Nationalist uprisings in 1921. The country suffered one million combat
casualties, several million deaths from hunger and disease caused by the civil
war, 1-300,000 executions, and permanent hatreds among ethnic minorities
engendered by the barbarism of the war that brutalized society under the new
Bolshevik regime.

The civil war shaped Bolshevik economic "socialism." Taking
power in 1917 Lenin expected to create a state capitalist system that
resembled successful European wartime economies. The Bolsheviks took
control of large scale industry, small-scale private economic activity,
banking and all major capital and let agriculture continue. The civil war
pushed them toward a radical wartime economy known as "war
communism." The Bolsheviks requisitioned grain from the
peasantry, made private trade in consumer goods and "speculation"
illegal, militarized production facilities, and abolished money. These
measures were responses to economic conditions beyond control.

Radical Bolsheviks believed war communism would replace the capitalist system
that collapsed in 1917. Though war communism lasted during the civil war,
the war devastated Russian industry and emptied cities' populations in Moscow and Kiev. The masses of urban workers
supporting the Bolshevik revolution employed in major industries diminished,
leaving fewer workers remaining on the job. Industrial ouput fell. War communism was devastating to
agriculture. Peasants seized and redistributed noble lands and held small
plots of land under twenty acres. Grain requisitioning and outlawing all
private trade in grain brought famine in 1921 that claimed 5 million lives.

Urban workers and soldiers grew discontented with the Bolsheviks. The
promise of socialism and workers control turned out a military
dictatorship. Strikes and protests broke out in 1920, but the Bolsheviks
subdued the "popular revolts." The Bolsheviks would not
tolerate and crushed any internal dissent.

The Bolsheviks abandoned war communism due to an economic and political
war-ravaged economy. In 1921, the New Economic Policy, (NEP)
reverted back to state capitalism after the revolution. The state
continued to own all major industry and monetary concerns. Lenin called
it the "commanding heights" of the economic system. People were
allowed to own private property, trade freely, and farm their land for their
own benefit. Fixed taxes were imposed on the peasantry, and what peasants
grew beyond the tax requirement was theirs.

Nikolai Bukharin was a Marxist who argued for
taxing private peasant economic activity to industrialize the USSR. Peasants were encouraged to
"enrich themselves" so that their taxes could support urban
industrialization and the working class. To Lenin the NEP was "one
step backward in order to take two steps forward." The NEP was
successful agricultural recovery. 1924 harvests were prosperous in the
"golden age of the Russian peasantry."

Land was redivided to level wealth between rich and
poor. Traditional countryside peasantcommunes produced
enough grain to feed the country using primitive farming methods.
Manufactured goods had to be produced cheaply enough to benefit urban
markets. Peasants traded grain at market and kept their excess
grain, their livestock, and their illegal moonshine stills. Hence, there were
shortages in grain deliveries to cities.

Joseph Stalin replaced Lenin as the leader of the USSR and became one of the most notorious
dictators of all time. Stalin's political success was in party
conflicts. A program of social and economic transformation began designed
to modernize the nation. The "revolution from above" was
the most rapid social economic transformation to modernization in any
nation.

Stalin was the undisputed dictator of the USSR. His real name was IosephJughashvili, a Bolshevik
from the Caucasus nation of Georgia. Rejecting the priesthood, he
participated in revolutionary activity and spent years in Siberian exile before
the Russian Revolution. He was a Bolshevik party member during the
Russian Revolution. Stalin was a master political strategist at internal
party politics after Lenin's death in 1924. He sidelined his Bolshevik
party opponents, Trotsky and Bukharin, who supported
the Leninist principle of collective leadership within the top ruling circle,
by isolating and expelling them successively.

Prompted by fears of falling behind the West and another world war, Stalin's
1927 plan was to step up and increase the pace of industrialization. He
began forcedindustrialization and total collectivization of
agriculture. In 1928 Stalin ordered officials to begin requisitioning
grains in the Urals and Siberia. He soon applied the revival of war communism to the
entire country. In 1929 he announced complete collectivization.
Peasants gave up private farmlands and joined collective farms, supported by
the state, where peasants worked as employees.

Large scale rebellions required military intervention and artillery.
Peasants resisted forced collectivization by slaughtering their livestock
instead of turning it over to the farms. Stalin launched an attack on
kulaks, well to do farmers, meaning "tight-fisted -ones."
Kulaks were not any better off than their neighbors, and the term was used for
those hostile to collectivization.

1.5 million peasants were uprooted, their property
confiscated, and resettled to inhospitable reaches of the Soviet east and north
or to poor farmland. Their land and posessions
were distributed to collective farms or to local officials bent on the "liquidation
process of kulaks as a class." Being forced into collective
farms or the exile of productive members of society didn't produce more
food. Famine spread senselessly across the southern region, the
most productive farming region in Russia. The only famine in modern times
to occur without natural causes cost 3 to 5 million lives. Famine
stricken regions were sealed off and allowed people to starve, while the
Bolsheviks had grain reserves in other parts of the country that were sold
overseas for currency and stockpiled in case of war. Resistance to Soviet
power never happened again, yet the state was forced to dispense small private
lots o! !f land to peasant
families that provided 50% of the nation's crops from a small fraction of the
land.

Collectivization provided resources for Stalin's "revolution from
above:" a rapid campaign of forced industrialization, The first
Five Year Plan 1928-1932, called for industrialization at one of the most
stunning rates of economic growth in the modern world. Industrial output
and the rate of growth increased greatly at the time of the great
economic depression of 1929 in the west The
Bolsheviks built new industries in new cities. Steel producing factory
towns rivaled anything the West had built. The Industrialization drive
transformed the nation's urbanized landscape and population.

The cities of Moscow and Leningrad doubled in size in the early 1930's, and
new cities sprang up across Russia. The urban population grew from 25
to 56 million as the USSR became an urban, industrial
society. Rapid industrialization projects were carried out with prison
labor in the timber and mining industries. The labor camp system,
the gulag, became central to the Stalinist economic system. People
were arrested and sent to incarceratiion camps.
An army of prisoners were used on dangerous industrialization work. The
Moscow-White Seacanal was
constructed without the use of machinery and dug by hand. During
construction many lost their lives. It was bombed in WWII.

Heavy industry was favored over light industry and quantity outdid
quality. Stalin's industrialization drive transformed the USSR from an agrarian nation to a world
industrial power in a few years. The Stalin revolution produced
changes. The working class populating cities consisted of rural peasants
mixed with urban culture. Women entered the urban work force in huge
numbers in the 1930's. 1920's radical modernism was replaced by
"socialist realism," socialism in art. Bolshevik activists
promoted utopian family society to create a new proletariat. There were
state subsidies and support for mothers, but soviet women were forced to carry
the "double burden" of family support and wage labor.

Stalinist repression in the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938 left a
million people dead, and one million and a nalf more
in labor camps. Stalin had a personal dictatorship whereby he eliminated
enemies real and imagined of the state. Aimed at categories of internal
enemies of soviet society, former and current political figures were visible
victims. 100,000 Bolshevik party members were removed, and sentenced to
prison or execution. Top party officials were denounced, condemned at
staged show trials and then shot. In 1937, 40,000 military officers were
arrested and 10,000 shot.

Stalin promoted a new, young cadre of officials who owed their careers and
lives to Stalin personally. Ethnic groups were targeted and suspected of
cross-border contacts that were a security threat to Stalin.
2-300,000 kulaks, petty criminals and social misfits were arrested and shot.
The Terror was Stalin's dictator power and personal control over social and
political life in Russia. The Terror was a result of
Stalin's personal paranoia. The Stalin revolution
reordered politics, economy and society. Private manufacturing and
trade were abolished. Factories, mines, railroads, and public utilities
were owned by the state. Stores were either government enterprises or
cooperatives. Reform and the national standard of health and
education was higher. Society emerged more
industrial, urban and modern.

Communism is used in an economic and political sense. It means,
economically, the ownership by the state of all the means of production and
distribution, and, politically, the dictatorship which permits no free
elections of competing parties. Elections were held in Russia, but only communist candidates were
eligible.

In the first period of communism, between 1917 and 1921, complete communism was
established. Land was nationalized and given to the people to use, rather
than to own. Businesses and banks were nationalized. Factories were
controlled by soviets. There was a working class struggle. The
dictatorship of the proletariat had intellectuals, middle class, and believers
in free enterprise dictatorially eliminated. The dictatorship of the
workers eliminated all bourgeoisie ideas. Then the classless society was
achieved.

The second period, 1921-1928, began the NEP or New Economic Policy of a limited
capitalism. The third period, from 1928, started Collective Farms and
Industrial modernization 5 year plans.

The Cold War began at the end of WWII. Allied powers relations
were over issues of power and influence in central and eastern
Europe. After the war, relations became that of mutual distrust and
conflict. The U.S. and Soviet Union rapidly formed the centers of two
imperial blocs of influence and rivalry.

The Soviet Union insisted at wartime negotiations in Yalta and Teheran that it had a claim to
control Eastern
Europe,
acknowledged by Western leaders. Visiting Moscow in 1944, Churchill and Stalin met and
bargained over the spheres of influence and over the fate of free
nations. Stalin mistrusted Western leadership and believed that bargains
with the West were worthless.

Stalin generated a siege mentality of the authoritarian Soviet regime.
Everyone was a potential threat or enemy of the state. Stalin's foreign
policy was Anti-Western policy. The Soviets' industrial losses and fears
of invasion meant they wanted political, economic, and military control of the
Eastern European countries they had liberated from Nazi rule.

The Soviets were suspicious of their wartime allies, remembering American and
British anticommunism between the world wars. Soviet diplomatic pressure,
political infiltration, and military power in Eastern Europe established "people's
republics" sympathetic to Russia in country after country.
Communist coalition governments emerged in states where one party took hold of
key positions of power.

Winston Churchill stated "an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe." Governments dependent on Moscow by 1948 were established in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslavakia
referred to as the Eastern bloc. Greece was torn by civil war until 1949, but
military aid from Britain and America helped restore the monarchy. The
Soviets crushed a Czech coalition government headed by liberal leaders Benes and Masaryk, a direct
challenge to the Yalta free election guarantee.

In the New Cold War, Germany split into two hostile states: The
Soviet zone became a semi-independent Socialist republic. The French,
English, and American zones formed a liberal capitalist state watched by
western nations. Western allies were merging their territories, passing
economic reforms and new currency. The Soviets retaliated by blockading Berlin, to cut West Berlin off from the rest of the Western zone.

The "Berlin Airlift" carried supplies to the western zone of
the city, breaking the siege. The two Germanies
looked like armed camps. The United States countered moves of the satellization of Eastern Europe and the Berlin blockade with programs of economic and
military aid to Western
Europe.
In 1947, President Harry Truman proclaimed the Truman Doctrine, that the
Soviet-American conflict was a choice between "two ways of
life." Truman vowed to support "free peoples" resistance
to communist infiltration and granted aid to Greece and Turkey.

The Cold War was waged by the USSR to undermine the west and establish
communism worldwide. Cold War tension developed between the U.S. and Soviet Union after WWII. The Soviets attempted
to expand its influence into Western Europe, and the U.S. "containment" policy
was to prevent the spread of westward Soviet influence and expansion.

Stalin wanted to incorporate all of Germany into the Communist empire by forcing the
allies out of Berlin and made its zone a satellite under its control. The U.S. authorized active participation abroad
to contain Russia within its boundaries. Europe was an economically devastated target
for communist doctrine. The European Recovery Program (ERP)
or Marshall Plan was ready to offer economic aid to revive the European
economy.